i7 975 or Dual Xeon W5580

[gam]

Hi

I'm ready to purchase a new pc and I'm not sure whether to get one of the latest i7 975 desktops or one of the HP Z800 or Dell T5500 workstations with dual W5580 CPUs with a good graphics card like the Nvidia GTS 295.

I'd like to end up with a fast machine, so I'd like some advice as to which way to go.

Let's put the cost factor aside for now.

I mainly use the computer for standard computing, Microsoft Office, some photo editing, I surf the net and download heaps, burn cd's etc etc.

I like to have multiple windows open doing a few things at a time and I like to play some highly graphics intensive games especially online. I plan to have this new computer in a network linked to a HP proliant ML370 G5 server with dual E5440 CPUs so I don't need a massive HDD.

I have a few SAS 146gb and 300gb 15k HDDs (seagate chettahs) so I was planing on sticking a couple of those in the new computer in RAID 0. Would a single SSD be better ?

Putting the cost factor aside would a workstation based system with dual W5580 CPUs, DDR3 1333MHz RAM be faster than the latest i7 975 setup ?

Thanks

[David (PassMark)]

I would take the i7.
The HP workstation probalby uses slower ECC RAM
For what you doing you don't need dual quad CPUs
The i7 is cheaper
The i7 should be faster for apps that only used 1 or 2 threads.

Save your money and buy a fast SSD or dual monitors. You'll notice this more than the 2nd CPU.

Having said that, the HP machines are nice solid machines. We have a couple of older ones here.

[gam]

Hi
Thanks for your reply.

The HP worstation uses DDR3-1333 ECC Unbuffered RAM.

So what you're saying is that for the applications I'm using, Microsoft office, some photo editing software, adobe, nero, 3D games etc etc I will only be using 1 -2 cores and won't get the benefit of the dual CPUs ?

So in effect I won't see any performance gain at all over the i7 ?

Which SSD would you recommend ?

Is there a quite a noticable gain in speed over say 2 x 146gb SAS 15K drives in Raid 0 ?

I couldn't find any performance figures for the SAS drives in your benchmarks... eg... Seagate Cheetah ST3300656SS 300GB 15K rpm SAS Hard drive

Also In Sydney we are limited now to a max of 30Mpbs Telstra cable broadband download speeds, but in reality it's more like 8-10Mpbs. Anything I can do or buy for this new computer to maximise download speeds ?

Is there any other faster internet product available ?

Thanks

[David (PassMark)]

So in effect I won't see any performance gain at all over the i7

Yes on average I think this would be the case.

Which SSD would you recommend

The Intel X25-E and you can put these into RAID to get better performance. And yes they will out perform pretty much any drive in real world usage.

There are almost no RAID results and no SCSI results in the benchmarks are it is nearly impossible to automatically collected all the hardware details.

In Sydney (as we are) 10Mbit/sec is pretty good. ADSL 2 can do slightly better, but only if you are lucky, and most people aren't.

There are higher speed solutions available for business. AAPT and others offer optical fibre connections in the city. They claim to offer up to 10Gbps ethernet on the fibre. See,
http://www.aapt.com.au/services/busi...-services/elan
They describe this as "cost effective". But I kind of think it might be pretty expensive.

[albertpaul68]

Get a dual-socket 775/771 with two Xeons. That setup will be cheaper than one i7 processor and will perform well. You're not crunching extreme numbers, so spending $1700 or even $1000 on a CPU alone is insame. Even servers don't use these, because it's not cost effective. More logical to just get more CPUs to cluster.